The pastel pearlescent sky didn’t much mesh well with the tension on the ground. But there, the Honduran lad stared down the CBP suv as it pulled towards the border. The boy said nothing. The officers stood across him in their fatigues,hands on the weapons with a joyful banter between them. They tried engaging the young man in conversation, but stone cold he remained. His eyes fixated on the burning electric halo over San Diego in the distance. Having every right to stand where he stood with his Mexican visa on a lanyard around his neck he feared no man. I had seen him the week before carrying a child away from the plumes of CBPs cross border chemical gas assault. He’d ran upwind from the punishing cloud that enveloped me. Like veterans from the November 25th gas attack at the border we acknowledged each other at the fence. CBP officers kept goading in increasingly hostile “jokes” with messy Spanish to elicit a reaction but the youth kept focused on SD where his family stayed; the only family he had left. His dad and brothers victims of a massacre in Ceiba retribution for extortion. Ariel* was a target but cruel fortune spared him. His mother, the only direct blood relation left just kilometers away, separated by a fence guarded by militarized chauvinists relishing in taunting the near-orphan. He bit his tongue as the officers verbally kicked down on the dehumanized human shaped ‘barbarian’ at the gate. .
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Months later I received a voice note from Ariel* “I’m with my mami and I’m helping her mind the duplex while she’s at work as a stay at home nanny,” he said. When they reunited they didn’t let go of each other, he said. They mourned their dead, and they embraced the 19 years of separation. Somewhere further south, nativist CBP officers still watch the border covered in body armor inside reinforced SUVs, armed with rifles and handguns protecting against emaciated orphans and generationally traumatized people looking for shelter in a country partially built by people fleeing violence. Painful as it is this is the world we live in. But somewhere in the US, Ariel and his mother are together, sharing love and the still surviving gift of life